3. Were the documents that they wrote faithfully preserved?

All ancient literature is reconstructed from its original form by comparing the manuscripts that survive. The material that the original documents (the autographs) were written on is perishable and will not survive for any significant length of time. Because of this and other factors, there are no original manuscripts that have survived from any ancient documents and the New Testament manuscripts are no exception. Is it possible that those who copied the New Testament documents added legendary material and created a fabricated Jesus? Could these scribes be the source of a corrupted text that does not represent the original narratives of the Gospel authors? How do we know if we can trust the copying process of the New Testament documents?

There is an area of science and skill referred to as Textual Criticism that follows certain balanced principles and guidelines and by applying these procedures, the textual critics are able to determine with a high degree of certainty what the original autographs of a document stated. The scholars who perform this task set about to carefully examine all known sources of manuscripts of a document and by comparing these manuscripts they are able to determine what the originals actually recorded. The greater the number of manuscripts to examine, the better the evidence from which to determine what the autographs actually stated. The closer the time between the composition of the originals and the copies still in existence, the better the evidence for a non-corrupted text.

How well do the New Testament documents stand up to this type of evidence? Can we trust the copying process of the New Testament documents?First, when we compare the number of manuscripts of the New Testament documents with other ancient pieces of literature, how do they measure up? Second, when we examine the time gap between the dated composition of the originals with the dating of the earliest copies, how do the New Testament documents compare with other ancient documents?

There are three areas of manuscript evidence that provide the necessary materials from which the New Testament narratives can be determined:

1. Greek manuscripts

2. New Testament translations

3. Early Church father’s quotations.

1. Greek manuscripts and the dating of their composition

The New Testament has far more manuscript attestation (more copies) than any other document of the ancient world. As of today, there are 5,800+ Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. The next closest documents in contrast to the New Testament’s textual attestation are Homer’s “Iliad” with 2,000+ manuscripts and Demosthenes -the prominent Greek orator with 200 manuscripts. Plato – 7 manuscripts, Tacitus – 20 manuscripts, Caesar – 10 manuscripts, and Pliny – 7 manuscripts. Most ancient writings have less than a dozen manuscripts from which to reconstruct the original.There are so many manuscripts of the New Testament that no one person or group with an agenda could have biased the text. This large number of manuscripts from many parts of the ancient world provides us with a high degree of confidence in the fidelity of the text. The ability of one or two groups of copyists who wanted to bias or corrupt the text could not be successful because there would be other avenues of the text from which comparisons could be made to correct any such effort.The time gap between the original composition of the books of the New Testament and the earliest copies still in existence in shorter in time than any other ancient document. This limited time gap further certifies the integrity of the New Testament text. The longer the period of time between the original text and its earliest copies, the greater the possibility of corruption.

Manuscripts that contain complete New Testament books survive from about A.D. 200. Most of the New Testament including all of the Gospel narratives survive from A.D. 250 and the entire New Testament text survives from A.D. 325.One important codex – Vaticanus dated A.D. 350, contains the entire New Testament. It is copied from a text dating from A.D.150-200. This dating is based on its spelling, format, corrections, added or missing material. This means that this entire copy of the New Testament is derived essentially from a text 50-125 years from the original New Testament documents. There are some textual scholars who believe that the text from which the Vaticanus is derived may be even earlier than A.D.150-200 and may actually be from the first century.

2. New Testament translations

The New Testament Greek documents were translated into numerous languages and these translations provide additional textual evidence that textual scholars can examine and study which can assist them in determining the original wording of the Greek New Testament books. Typically ancient literature was rarely translated into another language, however, the missionary motivation of the Christian Faith and the establishment of churches throughout the Roman world led to the need for the New Testament and Old Testament books to be translated into the languages of these new Christians.The New Testament books were translated early in the life of the church into several languages such as Latin, Coptic, Arabic, Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, Gothic…. The total number of these manuscripts has not yet been fully counted or catalogued; however, a conservative estimation is that there are over 19,000.

There are Syriac and Latin versions that were produced around A.D. 150. Some of these versions (translations) are as follows: Old Syriac; Syriac Peshitta; Palestinian Syriac; Philoxenian; Old Latin; African Old Latin; Codex Corbiensis; Codex Vercellensis; Codex Palatinus; and the Latin Vulgate, with many of these copies coming from the 4th through the 6th centuries. Other languages such as Coptic ( Egyptian) – 3rd and 4th centuries; Gothic – 4th century; Georgian – 5th century; Ethiopic – 6th century; Nubian – 6th century were translated from the Greek New Testament documents. The Latin Vulgate alone has over 10,000 copies still in existence and there are approximately 9,300 other early version manuscripts. These manuscripts provide an additional resource, that along with the Greek New Testament documents, form the basis from which textual scholars are able to determine the original wording of the New Testament.

Translations

New Testament textual scholar Daniel Wallace stated in an interview in The Gospel Coalition, March 21, 2012 –“NT (New Testament) scholars face an embarrassment of riches compared to the data the classical Greek and Latin scholars have to contend with. The average classical author’s literary remains number no more than twenty copies. We have more than 1,000 times the manuscript data for the NT than we do for the average Greco-Roman author. Not only this, but the extant manuscripts of the average classical author are no earlier than 500 years after the time he wrote.

For the NT, we are waiting mere decades for surviving copies. The very best classical author in terms of extant copies is Homer: manuscripts of Homer number less than 2,400, compared to the NT manuscripts that are approximately ten times that amount.”(See charts #1, 2 below).

What about the variants in these copies?

One of the facts that is often referred to by opponents of the Gospel is the large number of variants among all of the copies of the New Testament. This number is placed between 400,000-500,000. How can we trust the copies that have so many variants? Textual scholar Daniel Wallace provides an explanation of these variants –“The variants can be categorized into four kinds.

1. Spelling and non-sense readings:

2. Changes that can’t be translated; synonyms:

3. Meaningful variants that are not viable:

4. Meaningful and viable variants.

Let me briefly explain each of these. Spelling and non-sense readings are the vast majority, accounting for at least 75% of all variants. The most common variant is what’s called a ‘movable nu’ – that’s an ‘n’ at the end of one word before another word that starts with a vowel. We see the same principle in English with the indefinite article ‘a book’, ‘an apple’. These spelling differences are easy for scholars to detect. They really affect nothing.The second largest group, changes that can’t be translated and synonyms, also do not affect the meaning of the text. Frequently, the word order in the Greek is changed from manuscript to manuscript. Yet the word order in Greek is very flexible. For the most part, the only difference is one of emphasis, not meaning.The third group is meaningful variants that are not viable. By ‘viable’ I mean a variant that can make a good case for reflecting the wording of the original text. This, the third largest group, even though it involves meaningful variants, has no credibility.

For example, in Luke 6:22, the ESV reads, ‘Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man!’ But one manuscript from the 10th/11th century (codex 2882) lacks the words ‘on account of the Son of Man’. That’s a very meaningful variant since it seems to say that a person is blessed when he is persecuted, regardless of his allegiance to Christ. Yet it is only in one manuscript, and a relatively late one at that. It has no chance of reflecting the wording of the original text, since all the other manuscripts are against it, including quite a few that are much, much earlier.The smallest category by far is the last category: meaningful and viable variants. These comprise less than 1% of all textual variants. Yet, even here, no cardinal belief is at stake. These variants do affect what a particular passage teaches, and thus what the Bible says in that place, but they do not jeopardize essential beliefs”. – The Gospel Coalition Article – Interview with Daniel B. Wallace, March, 21, 2012.

Out of 7,956 verses in the Greek New Testament text (138,020 words), only a small portion, less than 1%, are variants that affect the text. The major portion of these variants, 75% are spelling and word order errors, 24% are variations that do not have viability and less than 1% lead to some uncertainty. The variants in the 1% category can be identified and in many cases are highlighted in modern Bible translations so that the New Testament reader can be fully aware of these handful of verses and see for themselves the limited significance of each of them.

New Testament historian and scholar Craig Blomberg commented on these variants.“One of the oft-cited statistics from Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus involves the observation that there are over 400,000 textual variants among the ancient New Testament manuscripts. Taken without any additional context, it is little wonder why some unsuspecting readers think there must be hardly any way to know if our Bibles even remotely correspond to what the original writers first penned.

It’s time to look at the context – and some additional statistics. There also over 5,700 ancient Greek manuscripts, including lectionaries, from the centuries prior to the invention of the printing press, with anywhere from a few verses to the entire New Testament contained in them. Add the manuscripts of ancient languages into which the Greek New Testament was translated, and that number swells to over 20,000. Now we have only on average 20 distinctive variants per manuscript, though obviously that number will be far greater or far lower, even on average, depending on the amount of the New Testament contained in the manuscript. The vast majority of these variants involve variant spellings of words that do not affect meaning whatsoever (and the largest percentage of spelling variants involve words with a movable ‘nu’ at their end – i.e., they can be spelled with or without the Greek letter for the ‘n’ sound).

Huge numbers of variants also involve the accidental omission of a letter or duplication of a letter or omission of a word or inversion of word order of two or three words or improvement of syntax, style, grammar or diction, where it is easy to determine what the original reading was.The United Bible Societies Greek New Testament, 4th edition, one of the two standard scholarly reconstructions of the most probable original wording for each of the New Testament documents, thus prints only about 1,200 variants in its footnotes, where there is even a small amount of significant doubt about the original reading and/or that makes even a small amount of significant difference in meaning.

English Bible translations usually choose only 200-300 of these to put in their footnotes or marginal notes as involving a significant enough question of meaning to be of interest to the average reader. These involve less than 1% of all the words in the Greek New Testament.Of these few hundred, only two affect more than just a couple of verses, the so-called longer ending of Mark 16:9-20 and the story of the woman caught in adultery -(John 7:53-8:11).

Only a couple dozen affect as much as one or two verses; all the remaining ones involve less than a single verse and usually only a few words.No orthodox Christian doctrine depends solely on any disputed text or texts. And because of the hugh volume of textual variants it is highly unlikely that the original reading is not represented somewhere in the existing manuscripts even where variants do appear…. So 400,000 variants – really? Really! And despite that, the New Testament is by far the best preserved collection of books, prior to printing, anywhere in the history of the world”.-Craig Blomberg, September 30, 2011 – www.denverseminary. edu/craig-blombergs- blog.

Even the agnostic New Testament textual scholar Bart Ehrman has written –“To be sure, of all of the hundreds of thousands of textual changes found among our manuscripts, most of them are completely insignificant, immaterial and of no real importance for anything other than showing that the scribes could not spell or keep focused any better than the rest of us.” – Misquoting Jesus – B. Ehrman, page 207.

Possibly the greatest authority on the Greek New Testament – Professor Kurt Aland wrote –“It can be determined, on the basis of 40 years of experience and with the results which have come to light in examining….. manuscripts at least 1,200 test places: The text of the New Testament has been excellently transmitted, better than any other writing from ancient times; the possibility that manuscripts might yet be found that would change its text decisively is zero.” -K. Alund, The New Testament – Reliably Transmitted – Stuttgart, 1986, pages 27,28.

Biblical scholar and philosopher, William Lane Craig affirms –“Of the approximately 138,000 words in the New Testament only about 1,400 remain in doubt. The text of the New Testament is thus 99% established. That means that when you pick up a (Greek) New Testament today, you can be confident that you are reading the text as it was originally written.” – Establishing the Gospel’s Reliability – Cited on April 5, 2010 – www.reasonablefaith.org. – William Lane Craig

In a post debate discussion October 1, 2011 between NT textual critic and agnostic Dr. Bart Ehrman and NT textual scholar Dr. Daniel Wallace, Mr. Wallace addresses the following statement to Dr. Ehrman –“…what I stressed in our debate was not how many MSS we had, but how many early ones we had. I noted for example that we have three times more NT MSS within the first 200 years than we have in 2,000 years for the average classical author. Further, we have more than 100 MSS of the NT within 300 years of its completion, while the average classical author has none within 300 years…. By any kind of comparison, if you are going to be skeptical about the NT MSS being reliable, then your skepticism of the average classical author needs to be 1,000 times greater…. They (classical scholars) do not as a rule display nearly the same skepticism toward their authors as you do toward the NT.” – Resource – Misrepresenting Jesus – Debunking Bart D. Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus – Edward D. Andrews, page 312.The New Testament documents are preserved with a remarkable degree of certainty. When compared to other ancient documents, the New Testament has no equal.

The following is a list of the significant New Testament Greek manuscripts and the date of their composition:

1. John Rylands Manuscript (P52) – fragment containing John 18:31,32,37,38. – dated A.D.120-130.

2. Bodmer Papyri (P66, P72, P75) – contains fragments of John 1:1-6:11; 6:35-14:26 and 40 fragmentary pages of John 14-21: Jude, I and II Peter: Luke and John’s Gospel – dated A.D. 150-225.

3. Chester Beatty Papyri (P45, P46, P47)- contains most of the New Testament. – dated A.D. 200.

4. Codex Vaticanus (B) – contains most of the text of the New Testament – dated A.D. 325-350.

5. Codex Sinaiticus (Aleph) – contains the entire New Testament Text excluding Mark 16:9-20; John 7:53-8:11. – dated A.D. 340.

6. Codex Alexandrinus (A) – contains vast majority of the New Testament. – dated A.D. 450.

7. Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus(C) – contains portions of the New Testament – dated A.D. 345

8. Codex Bezae (D) Greek and Latin manuscript – contains large portions of the four Gospels, Acts. – dated A.D. 450-550.

According to Norman Geisler – A General Introduction of the Bible referencing Bruce M. Metzger – The Text of the New Testament -dated 1982 –“There are some seventy six papyri manuscripts of the New Testament of which the foregoing are merely the more important representatives. The papyri witness to the text is invaluable, ranging chronologically from the very threshold of the second century, within a generation of the autographs, and including the content of most of the New Testament. All this is still extant from within the first two hundred years after the New Testament itself was written.” – page 270.

This number (76) of papyri is continually increasing with the yearly discovery of new manuscripts and is presently considerably higher than this number. Many of these manuscripts also contain books of the Old Testament in Greek and various Acocryphal books. There are many codices dated 6th- 9th century. The total # of Greek manuscripts at present is numbered at approximately 3,400+ with 2,400+ Greek Lectionaries for a total Greek New Testament textual witness = 5,800+ manuscripts. Textual scholar Daniel B. Wallace estimates that 43% of NT verses are in manuscripts that date from before 250 A.D.”. – Updating the Manuscript Evidence for the New Testament – Norman Geisler, September 2013 – NormanGeisler.net.

Chart #1

(This chart is subject to change. New manuscripts are being discovered on a regular basis).

Distribution of Greek New Testament Manuscripts by Century

Definitions:

Manuscripts – copies of the originals.

Autographs – the original documents.

Uncials – a style of handwriting with larger letters – like our capital letters. 1st and 9th centuries.

Minuscules – a script with smaller letters and use of a running hand (connected). – 9th century and later.

Papyrus – a plant cut into strips and formed into a writing material.

Parchment – skins of animals (sheep, goats…) and used as a writing material.

Codex – book form of bound papyrus sheets.

Variant – any difference from a standard text and a particular manuscript – word order, spelling, omission, addition, subtraction or rewrite.

Standard Greek Text – a master text like the Nestle-Aland Greek Text 27th edition or the (UBS) United Bible Society Greek Texts 4th edition. These two Greek texts are the same.

Chart #2

New Testament Manuscript Comparisons

Chart #3

Church Father Quotations from the New Testament

3. Early Church Fathers’ Quotations

The next area of evidence is textual information from sources outside of the New Testament documents themselves that come from the same approximate time period and can be cross referenced with the text in question to help authenticate the reliability of the text for reconstruction purposes. Does the New Testament have any references like this and how does it measure up with other ancient documents?The New Testament books have numerous passages that are quoted by second and early third century church fathers such as Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Origen, Irenaeus and others for a total of 36,289 times. They are quoted so often and to such an extent that all but eleven verses of the books of the New Testament could be reconstructed from these quotations.

When we look at other writings of ancient literature, the independent external attestation of these texts cannot be substantiated.Sir David Dalrymple, the great Scottish historian (1726-1792) was once asked –“Suppose that the New Testament had been destroyed and every copy of it lost by the end of the third century, could it have been collected together again from the writings of the Fathers of the second and third centuries? Having given himself to research on this question, he was later able to report, ‘Look at those books. You remember the question about the New Testament and the Fathers? That question roused my curiosity, And as I possessed all the existing works of the Fathers of the second and third centuries, I commenced to search, and up to this time I have found the entire New Testament, except eleven verses’.” Josh McDowell, The New Evidence that Demands a Verdict – page 44.

New Testament textual scholar Bruce Metzger confirmed this fact and he wrote –“Besides textual evidence derived from New Testament Greek manuscripts and from early versions, the textual critic has available the numerous scriptural quotations included in the commentaries, sermons, and other treatises written by early Church Fathers. Indeed, so extensive are these citations that if all other sources for our knowledge of the text of the New Testament were destroyed, they would be sufficient alone for the reconstruction of practically the entire New Testament.” – The Text of the New Testament, Bruce Metzger, 1968, page 86

Sir Fredric Kenyon, an authority on ancient manuscripts has stated –“It cannot be too strongly asserted that in substance the text of the Bible is certain: Especially is this the case with the New Testament. The number of manuscripts of the New Testament, of early translations from it and of quotations from it in the oldest writers of the Church, is so large that it is practically certain that the true reading of every doubtful passage is preserved in some one or the other of these ancient authorities. This can be said of no other ancient book in the world.” Kenyon,Fredric.- Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts, New York: Harper, 1958, page 23.(See Chart #3 above.)

Norman Geisler summed up the view of leading New Testament experts – “There were 36,000 citations of the NT by just a handful of early church Fathers (GIB revised, 431). But counting all of the Church Fathers, Dan Wallace estimates that there are about one million citations!” (see J. Ed. Komoszewski; M.James Sawyer; Daniel B. Wallace, Reinventing Jesus, Kregel, 2006, Chapter 6, p.14). – Updating the Manuscript Evidence for the New Testament – Norman Geisler, September 2013 – NormanGeisler.net.It should be pointed out that these citations and quotations by early church fathers are not the basis nor are they the primary evidence for the text of the New Testament. The Greek NT text, lectionaries and versions (translations) provide this witness. However, they do provide a secondary role of confirming the support for the 27 books of the NT and they do contain a substantial amount of the text of the NT. The quotations are not always highly accurate and there are scribal errors and mistakes, but their value to the textual scholar is impressive. (See the listing in Chart #3 above.)

Summary

Bruce Metzger, the great Biblical textual critic stated –“The works of several ancient authors are preserved for us by the thinnest possible thread of transmission. For example, the compendious history of Rome by Velleius Paterculus survived to modern times in only one incomplete manuscript, from which the edition princeps was made – and this lone manuscript was lost in the seventeenth century after being copied by Beatus Rhenanus at Amerbach.

Even the Annals of the famous historian Tacitus is extant, so far as the first six books are concerned, in but a single manuscript, dating from the ninth century. In 1870 the only known manuscript of the epistle to Diognetus, an early Christian composition which editors usually include in the corpus of Apostolic Fathers, perished in a fire at the municipal library in Strasbourg. In contrast with these figures, the textual critic of the New Testament is embarrassed by the wealth of his material.” Metzger, Bruce M. – The Text of the New Testament , New York: Oxford Press, 1968, page 34.F.F.

Bruce said – “There is no body of ancient literature in the world which enjoys such a wealth of good textual attestation as the new Testament.” Bruce F.F. – The Books and the Parchments: How We Got Our English Bibles , Old Tappan, N.J., Fleming H. Revell Co. 1950, page 178.

Norman Geisler has written on the nature of the accuracy of the New Testament text –“There have been different ways to estimate the percent of accuracy of the NT by different scholars. Here are estimates of several noted Greek scholars: Westcott and Hort estimated that about one-sixtieth rise above ‘trivialities’ and can be called ‘substantial variations’. That would make the NT 98.33% pure of any substantial variation. Ezra Abbott said about 19/20 (95%) of the readings are ‘various’ rather than ‘rival’ readings, and about 19/20 ((95%) of the rest make no appreciable difference in the sense of the passage. Thus the text would be 99.75% pure from rival readings that make a difference in the meaning of the text.A.T. Robertson said the real concern is with about a ’thousandth part of the entire text’. So, the reconstructed text of the New Testament 99.9% free from real concern.

Philip Schaff said that of the 150,000 variations known in his day, only 400 affected the sense; and of those only 50 were of real significance; and of these not one affected ‘an article of faith’. – (Philip Schaff, Companion to the Greek NT and English Version, 177, emphasis added.)This means that the NT is 100% free from any errors in essential doctrines of the Christian Faith.The words of Sir Frederic Kenyon still stand today: ‘The interval between the dates of the original composition and the earliest extant evidence becomes so small as to be in fact negligible, and the last foundation for any doubt that the Scriptures have come down substantially as they were written has now been removed. Both the authenticity and the general integrity of the books of the New Testament may be regarded as finally established’. (Kenyon, Bible and Archaeology. NY: Harper, 1940, p. 288).”

Updating the Manuscript Evidence for the New Testament, Norman Geisler, Sept. 2013, NormanGeisler.netIt is from this wealth of textual information-(Greek NT, lectionaries, versions and early church father quotations) that the text of the New Testament is reconstructed to accurately reflect what the original autographs stated. There is no ancient document that comes even close to the amount of material to resource from like the New Testament. If the New Testament is unreliable in regards to its text, then the ability to reconstruct any ancient text is hopeless. This is the level of skepticism that one would have to go to in order to deny the textual reliability of the New Testament.